in the midst of facebook‘s plans to expand their corporate head office in palo alto, california, the social networking company has
commissioned architect frank gehry to design an entirely new west campus in menlo park on a 22 acre site. based on a community-like
environment that will host a park atmosphere, where a grass roof with a variety of native trees will become accessible by foot,
the new development will connect to the current east headquarters via a
tunnel, where the path will create a transit route for cyclists and
pedestrians walking beneath the bay-front expressway.

the building itself will be a 10 acre (approximately 435 600 square feet) warehouse-type layout that will allow for employees
to sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects.
with construction planned to start in 2013, the new west campus addition will house approximately 6,000 people in the next five years,
with over 1/3 being engineers. the new eco-friendly space will accommodate a series of outdoor cafes, barbecues,
workbenches to complement the surrounding roof-top garden.

I quit facebook 5 years ago and have no respect for zuckerberg. What i find interesting is that the facebook concept isnt even grounded and they have re-entered the 1995 era of building large IT installations as if failure will never find them. Indeed even the project itself looks typically the overstuffed, new rich, menlo park mentality. And there is zuckerberg who cares less how it looks than the shock he feels by the bill for all this thats larger than his ego and he\’s wondering, is this facebook thing really gonna fly? And ole frank gehry is sitting there wondering if he\’s gonna get paid before it flops. Sometimes projects are just that and can be measured by normal architectual ideals and other times projects have to consider the underlying social realities they impact.

Frank Ghery needs work.
Zuckerberg needs credibility and matter for His immaterial world.
Ghery should should respect his principles for the urban quality of life – as a Pritzer Prized Architect should.

@MarkW
Why so much hate? Don’t you know that only visonaries fulfill their dreams?Not the haters that can only criticize – so even if it’s a crazy idea at least they are creating and I am very curious to see how it turns out

Flat, huge, as creative than an average shopping mall.
Probably the result of two great minds spoiling a very interesting potential project.
Zuckerberg is not an Architect.
Gehry is maybe too old.
This project is really bad, who can build, with the power of facebook, a flat parking lot ?
Look at Herzog & de Meuron’s parking Lot round the corner of Lincoln road Miami.
They probably missed something at the basis of this project : What does Facebook want to tell us about their future ?

It’s hard to judge a model, but looks like Apple’s new infinite loop HQ by Norman Foster is a lot more imaginative, suggestive of Apple’s creative leadership, and possibly an aid to innovation by the way it stimulates movement and flow throughout the building.

This seems like a village that’s emerged naturally, which is the way a facebook account starts and grows, of course. But it looks as if it might lead to dispersion, with units and teams isolated from each other.

The choice of Gehry is odd. He’s mainly known for wonderful concert halls and a few remarkable apartment buildings, not campuses or urban planning. I would have chosen, say, Diller + Scofidio or maybe Renzo Piano.

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